Fear is not real.
The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future.
It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity Kitai.
Do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice.
We are all telling ourselves a story and that day mine changed.
Cypher Raige, After Earth (2013)
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Hustling is the aggressive and sustained pursuit of a goal or end whose attainment would not be possible without a relentless focus on the desired outcome.
“The first and best victory is to conquer self. To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile.”
“One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.”
I’ve never really been big on hero worship, though I was quite nervous the first time I met two of my heroes. Something my dad always said when I was growing up is that [other people] put their pants on one leg at a time just like [him].
It’s kind of funny to imagine Elon Musk fumbling with the buckle of a poorly engineered belt (smile).
Anyway, it’s important to recognize the difference between someone whose achievements represent a lifelong commitment to work that matters…and someone who just happens to have done a bunch of seemingly interesting things.
Have heroes. Have mentors. Recognize greatness. Emulate the habits of successful people.
But don’t lose yourself. You’re great, too.
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Spotted on Facebook.
Yesterday I got a call from my sister Cheeraz Gormon in St. Louis who was standing with poet Elizabeth Vega. They wanted me to know that a few women had created, on lawns, in the streets, healing stations, a place where the youth could come and scream and cry and be held and heard in love. Mighty work.
In 2012, Jacqueline Nwobu (Jackie) found my site and asked me a few SEO questions. She subsequently hired me to do some optimization work on her site, and we’ve remained in contact since then.
In March of 2014, Jackie spoke at TEDxEuston about her journey in creating Munaluchi Bridal with her husband—a magazine featuring brides of color. [The video embedded below, and all you RSS/Email types can watch it here.]
In December of 2014, Jackie is putting on The Coterie Retreat in Palm Harbor, Florida.
The Coterie Retreat is a business conference presented by the publishers at Munaluchi Bride Magazine in partnership with Salamander Hotels and Resorts. You can expect 3 days of powerful speakers, workshops, panels, parties, and plenty of networking.
I’m excited to be one of the speakers at the event, and honored to have played a small role in augmenting a platform that now reaches her tribe across the nation.
This was posted on Facebook by one of my friends and intellectual heroes. We disagree on a great number of things, but this is not one of them.
I’m going to offer this very long comment as my last viewpoint on the Ferguson shooting and all of the rhetoric surrounding it. I understand it’s long but I think it’s something to consider. Have a great day.
What you and everybody is failing to realize while you’re all trying to place the blame within the black community and not toward the racism outside of it, is that the treatment of black people in this country happened long before 106 and Park and articles about sagging were on CNN news pages.
If, for a second, we can consider the history of the negro in this country, the pretenses that brought us here, our subsequent enslavement, jim crow, civil rights assassinations, drug wars, the merciless jailing and murder of black men, women, and children that has far reaching effects until this day in 2014 and God knows how long in the future, the propaganda written in newspapers and drawn on posters depicting negros as monkeys, having smaller brains and also being considered 3/5s human, having our land stolen, zoning laws that make sure our schools are underfunded, living situations being neglected, children under educated, glass ceilings at work based on skin color and all the psychological effects that came with those decisions, there is a very real reason why the negro is in the position he’s in, today.
With that said, 90% of crime for black folks is committed by other black folks. By comparison, 84% of white crime is committed against other white people in violent situations. Suffice it to say, if one simply looked at the numbers, white people have more to fear from other white people than they do of negros. It doesn’t make sense to compare black on black crime to police brutality for the simple fact that one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. Explaining that black folks are somehow implicitly responsible for being shot down, while unarmed, by the police is absolutely and unequivocally stupid rhetoric. And that’s putting it mildly.
Do black people need to treat other better? Yes. Still, that has nothing to do with the fact that black men in america are hunted, feared, and executed by police officers who can somehow manage to arrest a white person who randomly shot 70 people in a movie theatre and had his apt booby-trapped with explosives, or manage to arrest someone who planted a bomb at a race in Boston who later ended up on the cover of the Rolling Stone (or Time Magazine, I forget which one) but seems to have trouble arresting unarmed negroes who were simply walking on the street and minding their business.
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About a month ago, I was on a war path.
An exciting opportunity was presented to me, and I was certain that I wanted to move forward with it. The circumstances couldn’t have been more favorable in my mind—it aligned with a number of things that are interesting to me and represented a new and exciting challenge.
In my frothy lather of enthusiasm, I had the foresight to enlist the opinions of my trusted advisors. This task was attacked with gusto as well, I probably booked two dozen meetings in the space of a couple weeks. Feedback was uniform and resoundingly positive and I was full steam ahead.
[I recognize in retrospect that this was at least partially attributable to how convincingly I sold the idea, but that’s another hastily written post for another busy day.]
But I recognized that nothing in life worth having comes that easily, so I changed my posture and the questions I was asking. Specifically, I asked people to talk me out of it. I actually created a Powerpoint deck entitled “Talk us out of this” wherein I started outlining the facts and figures for my advisors to consider.
Well, I got what I was looking for.
It only took one quick call with a friend of mine who’s intimately familiar with the vertical I was entering to take the wind out of my sails, which is precisely what I needed. The nature of the opportunity, the risk I would have assumed, and the objective viability of the idea are all immaterial.
What matters is that my advisor clearly saw the gulf that existed between my vision and the realities I would soon face. I was blind and I knew it.
This isn’t to say that I couldn’t have been successful had I moved forward, or that considering was a waste of time (it wasn’t). The fact of the matter is simply that I avoided a potential disaster by changing my posture to accommodate my natural inclination to view something exciting through rose colored glasses.